The Blog

Thursday, 20 May 2010

Hello everyone!
In this post I would like to make a quick introduction to my latest project, practical part of my bachelor thesis (which is luckily over by now). Name of the project is Geoweb and its main part is dataengine for KDE Plasma. It comes with few applets, which makes it usefulness little better :). Project started as part of KDE Silk, which is project trying to integrate online web services into Plasma. Geoweb is kind of that application. It is using your position to find places near you. For now it shows food and drink places, but I am almost sure, that later it gets little more informative.

The thing I really like about this application is that you can set your location manually. It sounds weird, I know, why should I do that, there is a geolocation dataengine in KDE, so use it. Right, I am, it is the default option. But in case, that you don't have GPS in you notebook/pc, and your dynamic IP address is quite fallible, manual setting of your accurate location can be handy.
So location would be the input. Output is some data from Open Street Map. In the current state, they are food and drink places as I mentioned, and a little map applet showing your current location. Every food and drink place has some information added, like distance from your current location, opening hours and website if provided. Details you can see on screenshot or video below.
From technical point of view, application is dataengine, which is using plugins to fetch various data, implemented with help of Kross framework magic. Applets are just stand-alone, they do not have anything in common except of used dataengine. Location applet is little bit different. It has access to dataengine configuration, so user is able configure dataengine with applet configuration window. It is little bit loss, that there is no clean way to communicate the other way, from applet to dataengine (correct me if I am wrong), so I had to use some easy work-around to do that.

Rest I keep for the next time, so if you are interested, stay tuned. I just add, that the code is located on Gitorious as part of the KDE Silk, so you can try to build it and run, but build process is not very friendly yet, as cmake doesn't make almost any checks (PyQt4 and kross-python are necessary). The code should be readable, but it is my first KDE app, so not everything is written the KDE way. But I'll try to make it better.
See you soon.

Tuesday, 18 May 2010

This is my first blog entry. Great, right? For very few people who could accidentally stop by and read this few lines, I should introduce myself.
My name is Peter, I am from Slovakia (in Central Europe), and now I'm studying at VUT in Brno, Czech Republic (neighbouring country). And of course, it is information technology what I am into. The maker made me a programmer, so let's be it. On high-school I started with Pascal, at university I continued with C and now I am in love with C++ and Qt4. In work I am creating internal web applications written in HTML, PHP and MySQL. Of course I can do some python and bash stuff and yes, I live on Linux OS for some time now. My current distro is Fedora if anyone is concerned.
From user view, I really like simplicity, and I don't need uncountable number of options and things, so for normal work I am using gnome. But for programmer point of view, a really like Qt, so developing for KDE is much better for me. Don't worry, I am not any KDE power developer (yet), I just started not so long ago. The work I did I'll mention in my next posts, because that's the reason of starting this blog. It won't be strictly focused on any concrete topic, maybe later you can find here anything. Yes, maybe, I can't assure you that.
But back to the topic, some more stuff about me right? Besides the thing, that I make some programs, I like watching movies and tv shows (1080p fan), and playing some pc games. I am trying to support Linux gaming, and I can't wait for Linux version of steam of course :-) and yeah, I can spend some time on the internet too, surprise, surprise..
This should be enough for now, just one last thing. Why am I writing in English. Well, mainly it's because I want to improve my skills and this is one of the better ways to do it. Maybe I will write later some posts in my native speech, but I'll try my best in this universal language at first.
In next posts I can write some more spoilers about my person I'm afraid, but reading this blog is at your own risk. May the force be with you.